Linux in the corporate space

Lots of justification in this. Just be the change you want to see.
I only work with libre formats at work. If someone wants to collaborate, they can easily install libre office or gimp or freecad or gnu cash or whatever. Most libre software is free and cross-platform.
- I salute you. Not many that are willing to do so. Maybe because most people don't have very deep convictions on using FLOSS. It is easier to just do what everyone else does, after all.
- You can't do whatever you want if you're an employee in a big enterprise, there are company-wide rules and standards that you have to respect, you can't expect your colleagues to adapt to you nor you can decide which OS to install on your company PC.
  That's not to say you can't use Linux at all, you can ask your IT to be allowed to install Virtualbox and use Linux in a VM, that's what I do, there are a lot of things that don't strictly require Windows and I use Linux for those.
I've been a sysadmin for years and I worked longer on Linux than I did on Windows.
Many of your points are management bullshit. The proof? In France the gendarmerie (country police) moved to Linux about a decade ago.
The thing with windows is usually that management want a whole solution out of the box, from a renowned editor, so basically Microsoft. The key point is that they want a contract with a company so they can discard the responsability of failures on someone out of their own company. The second feature is that they are boomers or anti-nerds, so they are never going to be seen using something on a computer that's not mainstream.
The last problem is from Microsoft that worked hard these last years to remove any compatibility between office and other softwares of this kind. They also enshitified office365 very hard so that is doesn't work well on Linux.
The question of the price is a fraud. Large companies need an it service for Windows on top of the licences and infrastructure. It's way cheaper with Linux. The biggest work with an enterprise Linux is to make it compatible with the shitty Windows environment, and the compliance with the useless security thought for windows.
Well thought out post and largely true.
As a small counterpoint, I am supposed to use Windows at work but I use Linux. I would say that I am a “very heavy” but intermediate Microsoft Office user. That is, while I am not expert level in Office, I have to create and consume multiple documents per day. I give ( or submit ) several PowerPoints per week. These typically use templates supplied by Marketing or others. I create and consume multiple Excel files daily which almost always have multiple worksheets. I must admit that I have gotten authoring Word files down to maybe one per week but I open 3 a day at least.
Of course, I do not actually use Microsoft Office most of the time. Most of the above is in LibreOffice. I spend a tonne of my day in Outlook which I use in a browser ( Office 365 ). If I am opening a document from an email, it will often open in Office 365 online ( in my browser in Linux ). So do I use Microsoft Office quite a bit but rarely author anything there. While I prefer Firefox, I use Microsoft Edge on Linux and most often that is where I have Outlook open. Sadly, I have at least 3 to 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day. Teams and GoToMeeting are why I started using Edge. It is just a nicer workflow if Teams and Outlook are in the same browser.
Anyway, I have very little problem exchanging documents. I had to switch to default fonts that Windows users will have of course but that was long ago now. So, I would not say that “alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough” is a fair assessment for everybody. If I was an expert user in any one app ( in Finance maybe ) I could see this being true but I bet most office workers could use LibreOffice just fine these days.
Outside of Office, most of what I use are web applications which work just as well on Linux. I use containers a lot and they work better on Linux. Linux is quite bit snappier on the same hardware.
I am just a datapoint though and the issues you raise are real. I would perhaps just be less absolute about it. Trying Linux can still make sense. Also, you can try LibreOffice on Windows before jumping all the way to Linux.
You lost me at developers. Hard disagree.
For what it's worth, my company issues macs by default, but allows Linux or Windows if you request it. We just use Google Suite. Zero problems collaborating, and I work in a customer facing role.

I know lowes uses linux for there registers and help desks.

I forgot about that. Thanks for the reminder

In two of my previous jobs (I'm a software engineer) I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything. On of the provides a SaaS product and used Linux server/virtual machines. Otherwise it was mostly MS bits + sprinkle a little Atlanssian horrors to it.

Unfortunately in my current job I'm limited a VirtualBox Linux running a corporate restricted wintoys machine in a MS environment. A long for the days when I was more productive with my Linux installation.

It's just sad and funny how corporate world is that MS products it has to be (because reasons).

I was stuck in MacOS hell for some time. Now I won't accept jobs that mandate an OS for devs. It's either free choice, or I'm gone. Fuck that noise.
Was also in a company where Linux in a VM was the only option because it was a windows shop. Glad I quit that.
May the virtualized penguin bestow you with strength!
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Yes, and when the company gets hacked they can sue you for not keeping “your” computer secure enough.
  Sounds very American point-of-view. Installation and usage was officially sanctioned. Most developers in both companies preferred to use Linux, some used Macs, wintoys users were a minority. Neither company had any super restrictive corporate BS on their wintoys installation. Neither company is based in the Americas. Both are local companies in the EU.
- This. Linux Management is a thing and needs to be more implemented. Immutable Distros and more can help here, and should totally be used.
i'm stuck with windows, but i moved everything inside WSL... so at least vscode it's on Linux.
i'm a heavy multitasker used to tiling WMs, multiple desktops on windows is torture.

In Europe, there are companies that allow devs to use whatever they like (worked for some of those). Linux is more popular among devs than mac, but less popular than windows. I even have a friend working at a company that's 100% opensource, much to their chagrin as GIMP and Inkscape are no Photoshop.

Linux at school might become more of a thing in Germany as Microsoft 365 office online (or whatever it's called) is in a dangerous spot where it might be banned from schools. IIRC nextcloud and owncloud are positioning themselves to replace it and with that, maybe linux on the desktop might be considered. But since they have a problem with "Apple ambassadors" (aka teachers prostituting themselves for Apple), the real danger exists that schools will be more willing to spend money on fancy mac bullshit than linux. Only time will tell.

Can you please share some info about why office 365 is in a dangerous spot in Germany? Very based country btw, this might be the reason why they donated 1M to GNOME project, considering it public interest project.
- https://fossforce.com/2021/11/a-german-state-is-saying-goodbye-windows-hello-linux/
- From Dec 2022: "Microsoft Office 365 Declared illegal for German Schools, Again!"

Don't be so humble. You know, I started out exactly where you are, and to be honest, you know, my heart is still there. So I see you're running Gnome. You know, I'm actually on KDE myself. I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better but you know what they say. Old habits they die hard. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. I'm an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux? Again old habits. It's gonna be fun working with you. I should join the rest of the group. Bonsoir, Elliot.

Hello friend
- Hello friend

I have attended or been involved with five different state universities and a few different community colleges. For computer science, aside from one glaring exception, the default has been some flavor of Linux. The earliest for me at a school was Fedora 7. I think they had been running Solaris in the late 90s; not sure what was before that.

The only glaring exception is Georgia Tech. Because of the spyware you have to install for tests, you have to use Windows. Windows in a VM can be flagged as cheating. I’m naming and shaming Georgia Tech because they push their online courses hard and then require an operating system that isn’t standard for all the other places I’ve been or audited courses.

It’s much the same where I come from.
The high quality institutions have Linux in their labs (either a separate lab or dual boot) and a server with say access for training ML models etc.
The dodgy ones have only Windows with no software and require students to buy a second laptop and install Linux. If they don’t the students fail. Those tests were done in handwriting but they are still an accredited university :(
If you are talking about the computers themselves having Linux on them by default or dual bootable, then I'm kinda jealous. At the community college I attend, the computer lab for CS and IT related classes has only windowss 10.
- The universities I’ve physically attended have had dedicated computer labs with Linux. My undergrad math department was all Linux, come to think of it. Easier IT and not a huge need for Word.

When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called "coordinators" and "producers") used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

In game dev unfortunately it's exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.

Any web hosting company will use Linux for all servers, and many developers will use it as their workstation as they tire of kludging together dev environments in windows. The devops engineers will most certainly be on Linux as that is where their tool chains live.

There are government agencies that use Linux exclusively. The DoD used to have a mandate to use oss. I'm not sure if it is still the case.

Scientists, HPC.

There was an interview with Dreamworks ( i think that was the Animation house) they use linux for everything.

In engineering CAD and large manufacturing corporations RHEL and SUSE are the two certified distros for running Teamcenter Product Lifecycle Management softare and Siemens NX CAD/CAM/FEA software (up to version 12) it is a smaller market than Windows versions, but probably took the place of the original unix versions prior to 2000

We spent 1 year negotiating implementation of secure Linux workstation, and now after endless meetings and agreements I can proudly say we have 5 people with fully GNU/Linux laptops! Dell XPS, to be precise.

Nice! We are looking into it with my boss and one other colleague. Im really hoping it goes through and I can finally use Linux at work!

While I'm told such places exist, I have yet to knowingly interact with a business officially doing this for employee computers.

I have only ever used Linux at work. I tried amacbookd once, then switched back to Linux.

Honestly I deal with a lot of windows environments but I just run Windows VMs for everything.
KVM and Virtio or great

My past 2 jobs have been Linux Desktop. The one before that was WSL (ew)

At my current job, our department (DevOps), uses Linux (arch). A couple of devs too (Ubuntu), the rest use a mix of Macs and Windows. The Online versions of Office work just fine, there is Teams, Azure login and even Intune for Linux now.

At my previous job, most of the company used Windows, but the devs were using 90% Linux (Ubuntu), some of them with 2 machines (laptop and workstation with GPU, point cloud stuff). Ah, the good ole days of Ubuntu 16 and Nvidia drivers 🥲

The job before that, a very small company, mostly devs, we were using half Windows, half Linux (mint).

This is Germany btw.

I tried intune on Linux and it was hell incarnate, with edge dependencies and ton of background services, and crashing every now and then.
Did it ever get better with time?
- I mean, it still wants edge, which is okay for the online office stuff (SSO), but it's pretty bare, when compared to Windows. No policies and stuff. Install it and forget it situation, mostly used for reporting. Ah, we also use defender for endpoint, on all 3 oses, which is rather decent.

From what I've heard, it's more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I've personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.

It's all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.

I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.

I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.

Well plenty of VMS in enterprise or corporate environments use Linux. Tenant appliances, User access gateways, DNS forwarders, web app servers in docker containers, maybe even some load balancers and siem appliances. For corporate Desktops however I've only really seen thin clients running Linux before sign in to windows VDI, and that gets phased out with Windows for IoT

I'm lucky enough to be in a company where Windows is banned by the CEO. Granted, there are 4 (I believe) exceptions, but the vast majority of employees have an Ubuntu workstation and everyone has a macbook. A bit of a shame this macbook thing, really. A 2 grand thin client to ssh into my desktop when working remotely :D

The exceptions being client testing envs.

That sounds kind of odd

Several years back, I was 100% Windows based, and only knew Linux from the web hosting scene and running VPS Systems. I landed my current job which uses 100% Linux based OS's on their customer's equipment and software, Since then, I've gained a mountain of knowledge in the Linux admin and user space to feel comfortable enough to use it full time 100% in my household and administer it.

I think you would be surprised to see Linux more widespread out there, for example, a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian out in the wild mid reboot on signage or other displays, or being part of the brain boxes in industrial machinery. Then of course, - if you have an Android phone - well...that's a form of Linux as well. :)

The company I work at uses Kubuntu. At least the devs.

It was amazing finding this out as a Linux user.

It depends. I'm working in the quant department of a bank and we work on pricing libraries that the traders then use. Since traders often use Excel and expect add-ins, we have a mostly Windows environment. Our head of CI, a huge Windows and Powershell fan, once then decided to add a few servers with Linux (RHEL) on them to have automated Valgrind checks and gcc/clang builds there to continuously test our builds for warnings, undefined behavior (gcc with O3 does catch a few of them) and stuff.

I thought cool, at least Linux is making it into this department. Then I logged into one of those servers.

The fucker didn't like the default file system hierarchy and did stuff like /Applications and `/Temp' and is installing programs by manually downloading binaries and extracting them there.

To be fair, the three-letter directories aren't particularly intuitive. "Bin"? Like the "Recycle Bin"? Or is it short for "Binary" files? But isn't everything on the computer stored in binary? Is "dev" for developers? Is "run" for running programs? Is "opt" for options? What is "ect" even for, files that can't find another home? In Windows, the folder names make sense and have complete sentences like "Program Files" and "Users". I can understand someone wanting to replicate the same thing on Linux.
- what do all these mean ? if you have a good resource at hand

This might be cheating a bit since I am a computer science student, but we have Linux servers we can access for classes, and our university library has a maker space that has some computers running Ubuntu in it.

I know some schools in my country use their own linux distribution on pair with windows. And my organization has also their own linux distribution but it is barely used really. I dont know anyone who uses it, but I do know it exists.

At my company, we use ubuntu for the simple reason that our servers are running it.

Anecdotally and perhaps of interest, my current workplace uses a regular Dell PC running lightly customised 10-year-old OpenSUSE. It's a UI control interface for a large machine

Because the machine's expensive and production-critical, the PC isn't allowed to be connected to any networks (security airgap). It's sort of the antithesis of most corporate Linux usage: constantly online servers that do very little direct user interface

I work in cyber security. Loads of businesses will do all the cybersecurity stuff using a combination of tools on Azure and security OS's like Kali and Parrot.

Munich's city government switched to Linux for a few years as part of a push towards open source software.

There's some programs like One Laptop per Child that donate laptops running Linux to education programs. I think Pine64 ended up donating a chunk of their base-level Pinebooks to some schools but I can't find a blog post that states where they donated them to.

Not sure if this is what you were looking for.

Generally I'll see it used for POS type machines, or relegated to a backend database that gets logged into for parts lookup or something. Have I seen Jimbo in accounting rocking Gentoo on the company PC. Never.

I've ran across a few professors at nearby colleges using it. Last I remember was a nuclear physicists prof using opensuse.

We run thousands of Red Hat VMs at my company (and probably as many Windows), and several of my colleagues run various distros on their laptops with all our required desktop tools/security agents.

My university dual booted Windows 10 and Ubuntu (science department computer labs only)

All the other departments just had Windows 10, except for Engineering, which used Windows 7 for some fucking reason. I hope I'm remembering wrong.

Maybe engineering used Windows 97?

I use Linux at the office. I'm the only employee at my company who does.

I haven't had many issues collaborating with others using libreoffice while they use MS office. I do keep a Windows VM running for those somewhat rare instances where I need Windows for something though. I also needed to invest quite some time to figure out Linux alternatives for everything (how to use company VPN, how to get MS Teams working, how to connect to network drives, etc).

But so far so good. Been 100% Linux at work for maybe ~1.5 years?

you should keep a list and tell management how much software costs youre saving and how that can be scaled for every employee

It's staggeringly uncommon for the desktop side of things outside of machines running a specialty app or a particularly tech-savvy IT guy.

The issue is that Windows is just really good at centralized user management and policy control. You can do all those things in Linux too but it's significantly more complicated and harder to manage.

At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can't really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment

I think there are a few small companies that use it. Additionally it is used by some developers.

We have primarily used windows servers, but our datalake, data warehouse and internal apps are on Linux servers.

Plenty of software developers use Linux for their work.

Before Chromebooks, my towns school system had netbooks which were pitifully slow on Windows. They installed Ubuntu instead. The netbooks still sucked, but probably sucked a lot less.

Myself and several of !y coworkers use Linux at work bit, to be fair, it is a tech job.

what kinds of tech jobs allow workers to choose what OS they use? where I live it seems most tech jobs won't even let you install you your own software preferences unless its on their approved list, let alone install your own OS. they're too worried about company security and IT's ability to manage the hardware
- Dev jobs and data scientists often get a lot of leeway.
  Very big tech companies tend to be more open to it. When I was at AWS their threat model was basically to treat every end user device as untrusted, which then meant that they didn't rely on keeping laptops locked down for security.
- I work in threat detection research, and since most of what I'm looking at is people trying to get frisky with a Linux server my job is fine with using Linux for our work computers

Well, I wouldn't really say that it's used as a Windows replacement at the company I'm working at, because all the business stuff is still being done using Windows, but almost all developers are using Linux. I was even allowed to replace Ubuntu with Arch, because I was annoyed by outdated packages. Because of the higher freedom, I can even tolerate the slightly smaller pay rate and benefits that I could earn elsewhere.

We are mostly working on EDA tooling.

Linux the past 15 years across 4 different companies. CentOS, Ubuntu, then Arch. Now I'm stuck with MacOS, and it's worse in every single way except laptop battery life of the M2. Which, is nice when moving around. I'd still prefer a more powerful desktop computer since I'm 99% of time time in one of two places.

I've set up Linux machines for a school that had ancient computers and $0 computer lab budget. Within 2 years, they purchased new Apple computers.

We use windows at my work (I've been using Linux for 2 decades on home computer). I'm trying to migrate our work CPUs to Linux but the biggest road block is my unfamiliarity with librecad, I'm used to autocad. I use cad command line a lot and it's hard to live without auto suggest commands. Libre has the capability but it's very rough and not mature.

25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn't stop donating PCs. However we didn't have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.

I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn't need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn't notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.

A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university's IT director came to check it out and told me we're on the "lunatic fringe" for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.

Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who's the lunatic now?

We use Ubuntu at my work. Custom built image PXE booted so every restart is fresh. Has its pros and cons. Libre office does a decent job at replacing Office but we use Google workspace so most users are moving off local files. 90% of our users work could be done entirely through a Web browser so OS doesn't really matter as much any more.

The next job offer I will accept needs to have free choice of OS. I work with Linux systems and Kubernetes only, no Winshit but I am forced to use this shitty piece of crap of software. It is slow,buggy and clumsy as hell - maybe because of all the corporate software stuff and GPOs, the only office tools I need are outlook and teams, no word or excel but you cannot remove all the other stuff afaik. Updating is hell because it is controlled by our IT department, sometimes my laptop needs 3 restarts or is stuck in a boot loop. Just let me support myself and let me install some Linux flavor. Don’t need any support from corporate it besides vpn connection. Really fuck companies forcing *nix guys using windows. I know that for sure now. Never again.

Depends. Lots of universities have Linux and Windows computers.

Most companies use Windows, some also Mac and Linux.

I'm alwasys fascinated by IT people who manage a fleet of Linux servers and containers, but sit in front of a Windows PC. 😃

companies that do IC design, do it under linux. traditionally they were using proprietary unixes, but today it is mostly linux and redhat or compatible systems.

engineers are using rhel workstations from dell and hp that are supported by vendors to work under linux: let's say bios updates are possible to run from within linux.

their whole workflow depends on unix with many custom scripts (shell, perl, tcl) and simulations, usage of shared filesystems, and even x forwarding.

afaik IT departments in such companies aren't happy to support linux workstations and the trend is to move the workflew to linux servers and let the engineers to connect to those via ssh, vnc or x or commercial solutions like 'citrix'.

my understanding is also that companies design some requirrments, though maybe based on what is available on the market, and love to have support and solutions that are integrated with each other. microsoft still has everybody hooked up, their 'active directory' feels to IT people necessary, they also use microsoft's disk encryption, and/or third party windows software which encrypts everything written to usb flash drives to prevent leakage of what they call 'intellectual property'.

it is of course possible to do luks encryption of linux disk drives, but afaik rhel doesn't support it, or rhel versions these companies tend to use, since they tend to use very outdated systems, even eol unsupported systems, because 'customers still use those'.

i am also not aware of linux versions of those draconian services that encrypt everything that gets written to the flash drives, or that monitor/control computer usage, web requests, etc, so companies are interested to concentrate unix systems in data centers and get rid of linux end user workstations because these require custom approaches or draconian control software is not available, while windows users can be controlled better, with available corporate solutions.